Weekend Musings 29
Digital fundraising challenges NGOs face
“What is the biggest challenge NGOs face regarding digital fundraising?” was one of the interview questions from an agency hiring for digital fundraising. The agency had some interesting 7-8 questions while you submitted your resume on LinkedIn. Far better than submitting a boring cover letter. I was not selected even though my profile was liked. I was told I am expensive. Damn!
To begin with, the question is slightly vague as NGOs with different scales have different issues. For example, a small NGO might not have a daily media budget of INR 15-20K to invest in Meta/YouTube.
Anyways here are some of the important challenges that large NGOs are facing:
1. Acquisition and Retention: Past two years I have been involved in acquiring donors from digital for Indian and Asian NGOs. However, once the donors were acquired most NGOs would not have a clear plan on how to retain these donors and build a relationship.
One of the common ways is by having a clear email process for a new donor from welcoming him to keeping him posted about the program that she has invested in. Acquisition and retention should be interlinked. Otherwise, as an NGO you will keep acquiring new donors by investing money but with no retention plan, the whole exercise will be futile.
March 23 is celebrated as World Water Day. I received an interesting email from charity:water. I am not a donor but a subscriber to the amazing work they do. It was a simple email with no fancy things. The mail informed me about this year's World Water Day campaign “Clear The Calendar” along with a link to its donation page:
Not just online the campaign had an offline leg too. Be it online or offline the main campaign idea was seamless and every medium had well-thought-through integration.
2. High-value donors: Digital in India is a volume game. The average donor amount will vary from cause to cause but ideally, it will be around INR 1000 to 1500. However, on some days you will have those high-value donations of INR 10 to 20K. These are going to be rare but once you have them you need to appreciate them.
Some NGOs prefer sending an appreciation mail but I think dialing the person and saying a simple “Thank You” will make the difference. A person who has donated INR 10K is not waiting for your email and you don’t know where will it land. Even if it doesn’t it is far better than an email.
3. Fundraising vs Marketing: A bigger NGO means too many departments. Sometimes they are good but sometimes they create unnecessary problems. One of them is the distance between the marketing and fundraising team. I think they should work together because the end objective is to showcase the cause or why and raise awareness and money for the same.
Fundraising campaigns with good creatives build a great brand narrative and create a good reputation on social media. So in a way, it is helping the brand and marketing team.
Some international NGOs are diverting some of the marketing budgets to the fundraising team. It is still nascent but you can’t have a distance or ego between these two departments.
I have ignored some of the basic and operational challenges. I am sure there will be more but as you can see I am still learning :)
Wish you a lovely weekend. I am all set to enter the theater after years and the movie isn’t a Bollywood one but a Telegu movie Dasara. It stars Nani and I am just going for him.
Last year my biggest regret was not watching RRR, Vikram, Kantara, and Pushpa in theaters.
Life is too short to keep repeating the same mistakes :)